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The first sketch for The Happy Farmer, from the “Album for the Young,” Op. 68.

His grown-up friends he endeavored to choose only among people who genuinely interested him and who shared his tastes. Persons who could not partake his high-flown enthusiasm for Jean Paul or for Bach amounted almost to mortal enemies! As for Clara, his early feelings toward the talented daughter of Wieck were scarcely more than a brother-and-sister affection, even though some of his more extravagant biographers have written nonsense about him worshipping her “like a pilgrim from afar some holy altar-piece”. In his diaries one can find such entries as: “Clara was silly and scared”, “With Clara arm in arm”, “Clara was stubborn and wild”, “Clara plays gloriously”, “She plays like a cavalry rider”, “The ‘Papillons’ she plays uncertainly and without understanding”! And so it goes in continual contradiction. We must bear in mind, however, that Clara was then only about 12 and, however artistically precocious, hardly more than a child. Her father had seen to it that she studied violin and singing and had stiff courses in theory and composition. But it was only after she had been in Paris in Wieck’s company and known Chopin, Mendelssohn, Kalkbrenner, Herz and other great personages of the day that she matured into a young woman who, as Robert said, “could give orders like a Leonore”.

For his part Schumann was composing industriously. It is necessary to bear in mind that his early work, which comprises some of his greatest, is almost exclusively for the piano. Songs form his second creative stage, then chamber, then orchestral music. To be sure, choral works, an opera and miscellaneous creations sometimes cut athwart the other categories. But his works can be easily arranged in their respective classifications. The “Papillons” is probably the first masterpiece which achieved what might be called universality. Doubtless Schumann would have been grieved that anyone should think of the fantastic little dance movements and mood pictures which constitute the set without appreciating their relationship to Jean Paul and his “Flegeljahre”. But the whirligig of time has quite reversed the position of Schumann’s enamoring miniatures and the faded romantic work which inspired them. Today we remember the “Flegeljahre” chiefly because the “Papillons”, after a fashion, recalls it to our attention. But it would be erroneous to imagine that Jean Paul exclusively, accounts for those captivating musical fancies that we meet in this Op. 2—the clock which strikes six at the close, indicating that the imaginary throng of revelers is dispersing; the chord which dissolves, bit by bit, till only a single note remains; the “Grandfathers’ March”, typifying the old fogies and Philistines generally (an ancient tune of folk character, which Bach had introduced into his “Peasant Cantata” many years earlier). Not without reason could Schumann claim “that Bach and Jean Paul exercised the greatest influence on me in my early days”.

* * *

Let us at this point enumerate a few of the men and women who were gradually coming into Schumann’s orbit, who became, more or less, fixtures in his circle, or else grazed its circumference and went their different ways. Among one of the first names we encounter are those of Henriette Voigt, a lady whom Robert was presently to call “his A flat soul”, and Ernestine von Fricken, from the town of Asch, just across the Czech border. Ernestine was a lively and coquettish young person, an adopted illegitimate child, who fascinated Robert, to whom she briefly became engaged, and who passed out of his life as breezily as she had come into it. But if Ernestine was hardly more than a butterfly Robert nevertheless immortalized her. She is the Estrella of the “Carnival” for one thing; and, for another, it was on her account that he utilized in a diversity of ways the musical motto embodied in the letters of her home town, Asch. These “Sphinxes” as the composer called the series of long-held notes (A flat, C, B natural, E flat, C, B, and A, E flat, C and B) are combinations which constitute the basis of numerous pieces in the “Carnival”. They are not only letters which form the name of “Asch” but are also common to that of “Schumann”. Robert was plainly indulging in some more of his little romantic whimsies, mystifications or epigrams!

Other names we must mention—irrespective of chronology—include Ludwig Schunke, an uncommonly sympathetic young pianist, who succumbed early to consumption; Carl Banck, Julius Knorr, A. W. F. Zuccalmaglio, Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Francois Chopin, Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Ferdinand Hiller, Robert Franz. The list might run on indefinitely!

* * *

These individuals were, for the most part, Davidsbündler. Let us briefly explain: The “League of the Davidites” was an imaginary company, a creation of Schumann’s fancy, composed of many of his friends who appeared to think as he did and were moved by fresh musical and poetic impulses. Their sworn duty was to war on those stodgy traditionalists who harbored principles which impeded artistic progress. Imaginary apostles of the biblical David, the giant killer, they were sworn to smite the Philistines of music, defend and uphold novel, adventurous and worthy trends, publicize or advance indubitable merit and, each after his own fashion, promote the vital and the soundly revolutionary. Schumann enhanced the play-acting spirit of the movement by investing various members of the fraternity with fanciful names. He himself, in true Jean Paul spirit, gave distinctive labels to the opposing aspects of his own creative soul. Thus his fiery, soaring, active personality he called “Florestan”; the tender, dreamy, passive part of his nature he identified as “Eusebius”. When, as sometimes happened, these two irrepressible Davidites threatened to get out of hand, there was called in a moderator to re-establish sanity and balance—one Master Raro, whose model in real life seems to have been Friedrich Wieck. The cast of characters further included “Chiara”, “Chiarina” and “Zilia”—otherwise Clara Wieck; “Felix Meritis”, a thin disguise for Felix Mendelssohn; “Julius”, in actuality Knorr; “Serpentinus”, Carl Banck; “Eleanore”, Henriette Voigt; “St. Diamond”, Zuccalmaglio, and so on for quantity!

As a mouthpiece for his idealistic band Schumann founded, in April 1834, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik—a periodical which endured for over a century. Part of the time he was its acting editor and in any case certain of its most penetrating and prophetic criticisms were his own contributions. Possibly the most famous of these was the jubilant salutation of Chopin’s early Variations on Mozart’s “La ci darem”. This is the article entitled “An Opus 2”, which begins with the excited entrance of “Florestan” shouting to his fellow Davidites those words that have become something like a household expression: “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” The other is that greeting to the youthful Brahms, a kind of visionary glorification entitled “New Paths”, written for the Neue Zeitschrift almost on the threshold of Schumann’s last illness and including that pathetic cry: “How I should like to be at the side of the young eagle in his flight over the world!”

A stronghold of conservatism such as Leipzig was not the most fertile ground for a journal like the Zeitschrift. More than once Schumann thought very seriously